Operation Flashpoint

by Dan J. Marlowe

Erikson nudged me toward the closed heliport terminal. He snapped off a remark when he found the door locked, looked at me with his hand shaped into the form of a pistol, then backed behind me. I drew my.38. The bullet ricocheted off into space with a diminishing whine, but it had done the job on the lock.

  In less than two minutes we had plummeted to the ground floor in the high-speed elevator. Out on the street, Erikson’s commanding presence obtained us a cab. Two dark sedans were parked against the yellow-lined curb in front of Bayak’s apartment building. McLaren stepped from the first car when he saw us get out of the cab.

  “Don’t let anyone get past us here, Jock,” Erikson ordered. “Let’s go, Earl.”

  “The tool kit,” I reminded Erikson.

  He looked at McLaren, who went back to the car and brought it to me. “Good luck,” he said.

  Erikson and I crossed the sidewalk. “Let’s take the doorman up to the penthouse with us, since he doesn’t know you,” I suggested as we entered the lobby. “Otherwise he might call ahead and alert a welcoming committee.”

  “Good thinking,” Erikson agreed.

  The uniformed doorman was standing just inside the heavy revolving door. He nodded to me, but his gaze lingered on Karl. I stepped in close to him while shoving a hand into a jacket pocket. “No noise,” I warned, nodding toward the penthouse elevator. “Get moving.”

  He stumbled a step backward, his eyes on my hand submerged in the pocket, then turned meekly and preceded us. I punched the single button when the bronze doors closed behind us. Nobody said anything. I could hear the doorman breathing.

  The elevator doors opened, and I enjoyed the usually imperturbable Erikson’s first goggle-eyed look at the sumptuous apartment. “Stay the hell out of the way now,” I said to the doorman who looked as if he were trying to decide to have a fit or a chill. I opened the elevator fuse box and removed the fuse, anchoring the cab until we were ready to use it again.

  I led the way across the highly polished black-and-white squares of the foyer to the steps leading down to the sunken living room. I could see that we were none too soon. The Moorish swords and armor were gone from the walls, and the antique vases had disappeared from the end tables. Someone was packing the Turk’s belongings for a final departure.

  The arrival of the elevator must have triggered a signal somewhere in the apartment, because Abdel appeared in the farther bedroom doorway with a puzzled look on his flat features. He had a pile of folded clothing over one arm. The giant did a double take at the sight of me, dropping the clothing. He moved toward us swiftly, his slippered feet making no sound in the deep-pile carpeting.

  “Don’t shoot,” Erikson said to me as I reached across my chest. He moved in between Abdel and me. “Get started on the safe.”

  I drew the.38 anyway. I’d seen Erikson in action before, but I’d also seen Abdel. Felt him, rather. The two men collided in the center of the room like two bull moose. Abdel’s arms enveloped Erikson in a bear hug as the giant tried to wrestle the smaller man off his feet. Erikson’s shoulders bunched and writhed, and Abdel staggered backward with an incredulous look on his dark face, his hold broken.

  I set down the tool case in order to be ready to use the.38 immediately, if necessary. Erikson pursued Abdel closely, though, and his right arm moved sideways and slightly upward in an arc like a man hurling a discus. The bladed edge of Erikson’s palm thudded mightily into Abdel at the joining of neck and shoulder. I saw the whites as the giant’s eyes rolled upward. He tottered, remained upright for an instant, then plunged forward on his face. The windows rattled when he landed.

  “The safe,” Erikson repeated to me impatiently without another glance at the unconscious Abdel. I reholstered the.38, picked up the tool case, walked to the picture in front of the safe, and swung it up and down twice as I’d seen Bayak do.

  I studied the face of the safe when it came into view. I’d been hoping for a box made from welded sheets of pressed steel with asbestos packing, a type designed principally for fire protection. Instead, this safe had been machined from a solid block of steel and fitted with a circular door. Protection was not an idle word with this kind of safe.

  “How about it?” Erikson asked at my elbow.

  “Better tie up Abdel,” I told him. “This is going to take awhile.”

  “You haven’t much time,” he warned, but walked into one of the bedrooms. He came out in a moment tearing a sheet into strips. He knelt down and began expertly binding the still motionless Abdel while I went into the liquor storage closet adjoining the safe. I did some measuring there, and then made a ballpoint-pen outline on the wall as I visualized the side of the safe just beyond it.

  Erikson joined me. “McLaren brought you the acetylene torch, you know,” he said. “Can’t you burn off the front?”

  “Not this kind of box. These solid steel varieties are machined so well that heat jams them beyond repair. And there’s another reason. I know the safe is booby trapped from having watched Bayak work the picture. Presumably I’ve disarmed it by doing the same thing that he did, but if the booby-trap device is sophisticated enough, there could be another trigger inside to be activated if the front of the safe is tampered with. It’s a lot safer to go through the side of it.”

  Erikson looked at his watch significantly, and I unrolled the leather tool case and began laying out equipment I knew I’d need. An experimental cut through wall plaster and lath with a powered skil-saw disclosed that I’d figured correctly about the safe’s location. I enlarged the cut to expose the entire side of the safe plus its top.

  “See those?” I said to Erikson who was standing beside me in the closet, brushing at the fine white particles of plaster floating about.

  “Those” were two tanks atop the safe. I reached in carefully and disconnected the lever arm which would have activated them. The fingers of my hand came away covered with a bright purple dye when I removed my arm.

  “A jet spray of purple dye would have covered anyone standing in front of the safe who managed to bypass the explosive device,” I said. “The second tank is probably a flame thrower. The combination would make anyone who caught it in the kisser kind of stand out in a crowd.”

  Erikson didn’t reply. I selected a powered grinding wheel, plugged it in, and went to work on the few thousandths of an inch thickness of case-hardened steel on the safe’s exterior. When I had a bare spot, I fitted a special one-eighth-inch drill into a bit and braced my arms and shoulders as steel shrieked against steel.

  It was hot work, and perspiration ran down my face. I ran the drill alternately in long and short bursts to prevent its overheating. It broke through finally, and I reversed it to get it out. I replaced it with a drill an inch in diameter and went to work again. It went more easily with the pilot hole already established.

  When the second drill punched through and I withdrew it, I took a long-handled dentist’s mirror and a penlight from the tool case. I inserted the dentist’s mirror through the hole and then beamed the light from it, angling the mirror so that I had a good look at the safe’s interior. I wanted no unpleasant surprises.

  I could see nothing but loosely stacked papers and—in the rear of the safe—packets of wrapped money. I found a pair of medical forceps in a pocket of the tool case and went to work extracting documents. The forceps brought the papers to the edge of the hole, and my other hand folded and crumpled them enough to pull them through. Erikson snatched them from my hand as fast as I could produce them.

  “I need more light,” his voice said impatiently from behind me. I turned in time to see him carry a double handful of letters and official-looking documents from the liquor storage closet to the living room.

  I went to work with the forceps again. I maneuvered a wrapped packet of money nearer the front of the safe with the forceps, broke the strap, then forceped green bills through the hole in the safe a few at a time. I worked fast, not stopping to count or even to stack. I pulled bills through and let go, pulled bills through and
let go. The floor at my feet and then my shoes were covered with money. This time there was going to be a payoff on a job I did for Erikson, and not only for Hazel.

  When I couldn’t reach any more money packets, I scooped up the money on the floor and stashed it behind a wine rack. I repacked the tool case, brushed the plaster dust off my trouser legs, and went out into the living room. Erikson was reading and discarding papers and documents with increasing haste, glancing at his watch almost with each discard.

  I sat down and picked up a few of the papers he hadn’t reached yet. Some were in a foreign language, Turkish probably. A couple were in English, obviously multiple carbons of official UN business Bayak had attended to for his mission.

  “We don’t even know what we’re looking for!” Erikson snorted as he winnowed through the stack.

  I found myself looking at a sheet torn off from a desk calendar pad. There was a notation on it in bold printing: “Waybill No. 45603, carton marked AEC #3?45D, Hanford, Washington, shipping weight 12 pounds.

  I read it again.

  “Bayak said the package on the truck weighed twelve pounds,” I said to Erikson.

  “What was that?” he inquired absently as he continued to riffle through the loose stack of papers.

  I repeated it, and this time it penetrated. Hands stilled, Erikson stared at me. I gave him the desk calendar sheet. “Hanford, Washington!” he exclaimed. “With an AEC number! That’s an Atomic Energy Commission shipment!”

  “You mean—”

  “I mean it could be fissionable material, and with a knowledgeable physicist waiting for it in Damascus—” Erikson rose to his feet abruptly, the balance of the papers sliding to the floor. “This thing finally begins to make sense. I’ll call Washington right now and verify what’s in the shipment, but without a doubt this is what the Turk is after.”

  He strode to the telephone. “Any chance Bayak has his own line tapped?” I suggested.

  Erikson froze in the act of reaching for the phone, then picked it up anyway. “Right now I’d settle for scaring him off this job,” he said grimly. “Although I’d love to catch him at it.”

  “He won’t be anywhere near the scene,” I objected.

  “Oh, yes, he will,” Erikson predicted. “This is Big Casino on everything he’s been attempting to do in this country.” He removed a card from his wallet. “Operator, this is a priority call.” He rattled off a string of numbers, meaningless to me. “I want to speak personally to the Secretary of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington, D.C.”

  I carried the tool case to the elevator and discovered the doorman, whom I’d completely forgotten, flaked out in a chair, snoring. I restored the fuse I’d removed to the elevator’s fuse box so we’d be ready to go. “Then I’ll speak to his deputy!” Erikson’s voice crackled from the living room. “All right, who’s there who can answer a question about an AEC shipment? Then put him on.”

  He identified himself to the individual at the other end of the line. “This is an emergency,” he continued rapidly. “I need to know the freight line and the route for an AEC shipment on Waybill number four-five-six-O-three, carton number three-M-four-five-D out of Hanford. I realize it will take time, but it had better not take too much. No, you can’t call me back here.” He recited another number. “That’s the phone number in our communications car. Call through the mobile operator. And push this thing for all you’re worth.”

  He hung up the phone, bounded up the steps from the sunken living room, and approached me at the elevator. I indicated the sleeping doorman, but Erikson paid no attention. “You’re still the only link,” he told me. “If we get the information in time, we can pull you back from the center of the action, but right now it’s on to Bayonne.” He stepped aboard the elevator.

  “What happens in Bayonne?” I asked as we descended.

  “If we get a call telling us where we can intercept the shipment, we’ll divert the truck and you’ll be out of it,” Erikson said. He looked at his watch in what was becoming a ritual gesture.

  “And if you don’t?”

  “I’m supplying you with a car with a transmitter we can home in on from the comcar. We’ll be behind you.”

  Out on the sidewalk, McLaren and a man I didn’t know were standing, watching the entrance to the building. “Get into the first car with McLaren and me, Wilson,” Erikson ordered. “Drake will take yours.”

  McLaren handed me an object I recognized as one of the beepers I had seen in the equipment room. “If you have to change cars for any reason, take this with you and attach it to the other car, preferably on the outside. It has a magnetic plate so it will stick to any metal you can reach.”

  The second man, Wilson, brought a canvas sack from the first car which he handed to McLaren. “This is your acetylene torch and plastic,” McLaren said, handing me the sack. “And here’s the map.”

  He handed me a detailed drawing of a waterfront area. “Don’t forget to detail a man to take Abdel into custody, Jock,” Erikson said. He took the map from me and marked Pier Twenty-six with a star. “We’ll lead the way to Bayonne, to this point.” He placed a finger on the map. “Then we’ll drop back behind you.”

  “Suppose you lose me?”

  “We can’t lose you as long as you have the beeper. If we don’t flag you down in the meantime, when you make contact with these people, drag it out as much as you can so we can move in close. Now roll it.”

  Not for the first time in my association with him, I realized that Karl Erikson would use his own grandmother to get a necessary job done.

  I made the gatehouse at Pier Twenty-six with sixteen minutes to spare, according to Bayak’s timetable. I sat in the car for another seven minutes before anything happened. Then a glare of headlights swept over me in the driver’s seat. A sedan pulled in alongside, so tightly I couldn’t have opened the door on my side.

  A man jumped out and approached my car on the passenger’s side. He rapped on the window. I leaned across the seat to lower it with my left hand, keeping my right close to my.38. Even in partial shadow, I could make out dark features and an Arab cast of countenance. “You have identification?” the man asked when I had the window down.

  I started to ask what he meant, and then I realized. I opened the canvas sack on the front seat and showed him the acetylene torch. He nodded. “Come with us,” he said.

  I brought the bag and the beeper with me. When my interrogator opened the door of the sedan, I handed him the canvas sack. He leaned into the car to put it into the back, and I slapped the miniature homing device under the skirt of the rear fender. The man motioned me into the back seat, and I found myself alongside another swarthy individual who was smoking a cigarette that gave off a bitter, disagreeable odor.

  The man who had approached me got under the wheel, and the sedan left the dock area and rolled along for a dozen blocks through a warehouse district. The air polluter in the back seat with me had nothing to say. Then the car swung into an alley and stopped halfway through it. Another turn and the headlights were beamed upon a corrugated steel door. The driver beeped the horn three times.

  The door clattered upward and we drove inside.

  My heart sank when I saw that the building was a steel warehouse.

  If I knew anything about electronics, the steel would form a shield cutting off the beeper signal as effectively as if I’d dropped it into the East River.

  Erikson could never find me now.

  I was committed to the hijack.

  11

  THE interior of the warehouse looked as large as a football field. Powerful ceiling lights at ten-yard intervals gave plenty of illumination. Except for one corner where a green panel truck was parked alongside high-piled crates, the warehouse was empty.

  A man approached our car. He was short, muscular, swarthy, and bold of eye. In appearance he could have been a younger brother of the deceased Hawk. The man listened with no expression on his hard-bitten features to our driver’s rat-a-tat-ta
t explanation of what I took to be an affirmation of my credentials.

  The muscular man nodded finally, threw away the stub of a cigar he’d been smoking, opened up the canvas sack to see for himself the torch and explosives that were my passport, and at last turned to me. “I’m Hassan,” he said. “The others will be here shortly and you can conduct the briefing.” His English was perfect.

  I didn’t say anything. I had rebounded from the low point I’d experienced upon driving inside the steel warehouse, because common sense dictated that the hijack wouldn’t be taking place there. When we left for the hijack location, Erikson would once again be able to pick up the bumper beeper signals, if he trusted his equipment and didn’t move too far away during the signal black-out.

  Hassan said something to the man who had been riding in the back seat with me. The man went to the green panel truck, opened the rear doors, and removed a folding card table which he proceeded to set up beneath one of the overhead lights. Hassan lit up a fresh cigar before placing on the card table a sheet of paper. Even at a distance, I recognized it as a facsimile of the street plan of the hijack location I’d seen in Erikson’s office, but without the circles and squares indicating the placement of men and vehicles.

  There was a triple-beep outside the warehouse. Hassan went to the entrance and punched a button. The huge door slid upward and another car rolled inside. It was just as well that Erikson hadn’t been following too closely, I reflected. The second car had obviously been trailing the one which brought me.

  Two men got out of the second car. Both were dressed in nondescript olive-drab jackets and trousers. Facially they could have been twins of the pair who met me at the gate house. One of the newcomers was carrying an M-16 automatic rifle.

  The five men crowded around the card table. “You have the floor,” Hassan said to me.

  “Okay. Where’s the map of the actual location?”

  “You don’t need that.”

  “The hell I don’t. How am I going to lay out a getaway if I don’t know the location?”